


protecting this, protecting that

by glitterforplaster (ineffableangel)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, check out my other trc fic if you're angling for that, i want to say this is more gansey/adam/ronan but, once again this is entirely self-serving, only in my heart unfortunately, when is anything i write not entirely self-serving tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 11:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2506904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineffableangel/pseuds/glitterforplaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Could you pull someone out of a dream if you longed for them enough?</p>
            </blockquote>





	protecting this, protecting that

**Author's Note:**

> title from "sleep awake" by mother mother, which is such a ronan song i put it on my fanmix. i also considered _pitching myself for leads in other peoples dreams_ from "disloyal order of water buffaloes" by fall out boy (a personal fave). it was difficult to pick, but i felt this fit best.
> 
> major spoilers for the dream thieves, one teensy tiny spoiler for blue lily lily blue. warning for mention of abuse as per canon.

After Kavinsky, Ronan stopped dreaming about night horrors and started dreaming about dragons. He dreamt about the fight on repeat like a scratched record, unable to remember how he got there but knowing, always, how it would end. A million white Mitsubishis, a dream within a dream, _He's never going to be with you_ _,_ skip, _I’m in your head_ , skip, thunder, _You didn't say you don't swing that way._ Skip. Matthew in the trunk, Kavinsky on the ground. Fireworks to fire through a piece of work. A million white Mitsubishis, one brother, one fall. Anyone can fall. Ronan did it all the time.

Even a thief could not always control their own dreams, and these days Ronan’s seemed to show him the worst parts of himself, even after he had made peace with the pieces. This bothered him; Cabeswater was dark but it was burning; Kavinsky was mouthing poison bruises up his neck, dark as ravens, except it wasn’t kissing so much as devouring. Wrecking a wreck. Car crash hearts. He didn’t want to dream like that. He didn’t want to miss something he made go missing.

He was careful to never touch the Kavinsky in his head unless it touched him first. He didn’t want to shove too hard in case he shoved it _out_. Two Kavinskys in the world was two Kavinskys too many, even if one of them was in the ground.

(A secret takes two people, one to keep it and one to never know, and if the former is two of the same person then the latter is fucked.)

Because he could not stop dreaming entirely, Ronan took to searching out the places beyond Cabeswater in an effort to leave himself behind, the way he used music to drown his thoughts. He hated his own problems so fiercely that he would rather live someone else's, and though this was true of most teenagers, Ronan was the only one capable of actually doing it. He was keeper of secrets, walker of stars, and child of a wish. He could travel the world as he pleased and never leave his room. He was a Greywarren. He was _the_ Greywarren.

After Kavinsky, Ronan stopped dreaming his own dreams and started dreaming other people’s.

**  
  
**

*

**  
  
**

This was how Ronan Lynch stepped into the night musings of strangers: He found the place where the trees ceased to be trees and became the _idea_ of trees, the place where the magic could not reach, where dreaming became science and synapse and subconscious instead of birthright. He kept walking. It didn't matter for how long; he wouldn't remember this part later. It would slip away from him like silvery fish, regardless of how many Irish jigs he whistled to keep track, because here time was sly and untouchable and _not yet_ meant the same as _a long time ago_.

First would come the sunset, all pink and gold and effervescent high up in the heavens, though if you walked behind it, it hung low and washed out, like a thoughtless artist’s painting. Next would be the red Camaro, redder still for facing the sunset, gleaming and temperamental and beloved. Then came the boy, equally gleaming and temperamental and beloved, sitting on the hood, head cradled in one palm. His feather-delicate features caught the light iridescent, beautiful, but despair rolled off him in waves, and on all sides stretched a vast, silent nothing. Sunset, car, messed up kid. There was nothing else here.

This was Richard Gansey III's nightmare.

Ronan always seemed to find this one quickest. _Coincidence_ , he thought, because he had to, because it wasn't. He wondered if it had to do with proximity: if he stumbled upon Gansey’s dreams first because they were under the same roof, or because they were closer than brothers.

( _Don't say Dick Gansey, man. He's never going to be with you—_

 _That's not what Gansey is to me._ )

It was rare that both Ronan and Gansey slept at once, or at all, so it was rare that both Ronan and Gansey inhabited the same dream space, but he hardly needed to see this more than a single time to understand what he had to do.

“Hey,” Ronan said, one moment far away, and another motioning at the space next to Gansey on the hood of the Pig. “You mind company?”

Gansey didn't answer, or lift his head from his hands, but they must have skipped something, because Ronan was already sitting there.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?” Gansey mumbled through his fingers. Richard Gansey III never mumbled, in life or in dreams, but this version seemed broken, somehow. Cracked open and hollowed out.

“Yeah. Beautiful.” Ronan wasn't watching the sunset. He never did. He asked a question he hadn't thought to ask the other times: “Do you know where we are?”

Finally, Gansey pulled his hands away from his face. The skin on his palms was scratched and raw, like he'd been pounding on the earth or scraping them across the fender of the Pig. He looked at Ronan carefully, and then began to laugh, wild and surprised and cut-up. It was a discomforting sound. It was too honest. “Cabeswater,” he called, spreading his arms grandly, and dropping them a moment later, seeming to lose color again, to fade like a flickering lantern. “Or where it should be.”

They'd fixed the ley line weeks ago, he and Adam and the absence of Kavinsky, restoring the forest to its full potential— its disappearance had been brief, but Ronan knew that dreams weren't rational. Here, then, was that moment of fear — Gansey's purpose, his direction, his quest, all gone for good, _What am I without Glendower?_ — amplified tenfold and never-ending.

“I can—” Ronan began, and then held his tongue. _I can fix it,_ he was about to say. _I have fixed it. I would do it again, just for you._

Is this what his nightmares had meant? Did he see the fight through, the party and the pills and the all-consuming fire, in his subconscious, and Cabeswater returned to Gansey’s? He didn't want to relive that night again, not for the thousandth time. A million white Mitsubishis, a million replays. A million white Mitsubishis, one mistake that wasn't his. There had to be another way. _I can— I can—_

_I can show you Cabeswater._

It might not exist in Gansey's dream, but it existed in Ronan's. If he could convince Gansey to come with him, maybe he could change this empty landscape, and maybe Gansey really could enjoy the sunset for once.

Then again, there were three ways inviting Gansey into his head could go: it didn’t work at all, it was a spectacularly good idea and Gansey’s sleepless nights moved on to other puzzles, or it was a spectacularly bad idea and Gansey saw something he was never meant to see, the shadows of Ronan’s ever-dark mind, the terrors and the shakes and the monsters under the bed that were as much a part of him as his machine-quick arm, his war mouth, his wild and howling heartbeat.

There were, in fact, more than three ways inviting Gansey into his head could go, but Ronan made a point not to think the others. You never knew what was listening in, and, though this was not his own, raw, power-charged dreaming, his mere presence here made the magic seek out the cracks. He could feel it, a starved dog begging at the door. It missed him. It wanted him back.

There was something Ronan wanted, too, equally as sharp, equally as disastrous: Gansey. He wanted Gansey like you might want a fix, a knife, a king, a forest fire. He wanted Gansey like you might want a star, a hot, self-hating tug, void of all sense, impossible and ill-advised and cosmic. He craved Gansey. And there, in that craving, was another problem.

Could you pull someone out of a dream if you longed for them enough? Ronan knew that it was possible. His own mother— Matthew— not imaginary, but imagined. Human now, real now, but not always, and not forever. Dreamers dreamt. So did their dreams.

Ronan had not been worried about mistakenly pulling out that Kavinsky he never touched; careful, yes, but never worried, because he did not want Kavinsky. He had never wanted Kavinsky, not quite, though he had entertained the idea. He did, however, want Gansey, and he wondered if, were he to displace Gansey from his own dream, Gansey could ever return. Ronan was the Greywarren, he did what he pleased and walked where no demon would dare to tread, but here the magic was only that scrapped, hungry stray. It did not promise the protection of his friends.

Would it be two Ganseys or none? Ronan could not imagine a world without Gansey, and, though it was a good dream, two would be worse. They were family; you could not say, _they were family, no more,_ because that, to them, was _most_. He couldn’t chance it.

“I have a lot of secrets,” Ronan said, finally, after an undefined dream-loop of intense thought. “I have so many secrets I choke under the weight of them, sometimes. There are things I can’t tell you, even here, where you won’t remember them. But… Whatever happens, man— if you find Glendower and become king of the world, if you never find him at all— I’ll be here.” Ronan looked at nightmare Gansey, and nightmare Gansey looked at Ronan.

“You’re not alone,” Ronan said, and Gansey woke up.

**  
  
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*

**  
  
**

Ronan made a point of visiting Gansey’s dreams, after that. He didn’t do it often, because Heaven knew neither of them had regular sleep schedules, and what if he wandered into a dream about fishing or taxes or the Smiths or whatever it was old souls in young bodies dreamt about? Boring. Besides, it was invasive; people’s heads were meant to stay their own. He’d faked his way through enough therapy sessions to know that. He only worried, was all.

It seemed Gansey’s subconscious had moved onto other anxieties, all of them surrounding Glendower. Ronan half-hoped for naked Latin grammar exams, where he could easily sit in the front row and whisper the answers while carefully averting his eyes, but it was too optimistic to think that Gansey might have _normal_ nightmares, if he had to have nightmares at all. Ronan was hardly a good judge of _normal_ nightmares, anyway.

Gansey gave no indication of having noticed Ronan’s influence on his dreams, but he seemed marginally less stressed, for all that a Gansey can be less stressed. If you did happen to stumble into a stranger’s dream, there was no guarantee it was their dream, and not you dreaming of their dream, and if, somehow, you proved it truly was their dream, they would anyway assume _they_ had dreamed _you_. Sometimes, Ronan found, that was best.

He tried it again. No Camaro, no sunset, still the messed up kid. He kept walking. He walked so far he wasn’t sure he’d ever moved.

“Oh,” someone said, surprised. “Shit.”

Ronan turned around. The someone was Blue. She was in the kitchen at 300 Fox Way, in a pair of Batgirl pajama pants ripped at the knee, a spoonful of yogurt poised halfway to her mouth.

“You dream about eating yogurt?” Ronan asked, incredulous.

“No, asshole,” said Blue, taking a bite and putting the spoon back in the container. “I’m not dreaming. I am _actually_ eating yogurt. It’s the middle of the night, how did you even get in here?”

“I don’t think I did,” Ronan said, eyeing her bedhead. It was impressive. “I’m still asleep. You’re picking up my astral energy or something.”

“Cool,” Blue said, eyebrows raised. “Have fun with that. Get out of my kitchen, maybe?”

“As you wish, princess.” Ronan paused. “Nice pants.”

“Thanks,” Blue said. He couldn’t quite tell if she meant it or if she was mocking him back. “I was so pissed about Gail Simone, though, weren’t you? What an ableist dickbag.”

“Yeah, man.” Ronan shook his head, and he and Blue shared a look that not only said, _Comic retcons, am I right?_ but shouted it from rooftops. “Barbara was already the hero in her wheelchair. She didn't need saving. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” Blue said, and Ronan went back to dreaming.

**  
  
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*

**  
  
**

Again. No Camaro, no sunset, no kid, no Blue. Ronan kept walking. Noah didn’t sleep; when they weren’t looking at him, he wasn’t there. Ronan kept walking. Henry Cheng dreamt of democracy. He was as bad as Richard Gansey II. Ronan kept walking. A woman who lived down the street from Aglionby dreamed of over-watering her garden so fiercely it grew into a magic forest. Ronan wondered if she knew about the ley line. He kept walking. Again. He kept walking.

**  
  
**

*

**  
  
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Tonight, fingers curled in against his chest, an ineffectual protection from whatever might be waiting for him on the other side, Ronan tested his limits. Or, rather, Ronan tested what other people thought should be his limits, because Ronan had since given up the idea of limits entirely. He had no strings. He belonged to no one. He had too many weaknesses and too many issues and no qualms pushing himself until he snapped, throwing punches until someone punched him back.

And, just like that, Ronan was thinking of Adam. He always thought of Adam, or Declan, or Kavinsky, or his father in the ground, eventually: problems to fix, or problems that could not be fixed. He had a preoccupation with fixing. He envied Adam his mechanic’s skills. He thought of Adam, again, and this time could not stop. He thought of Adam’s high Henrietta cheekbones, his freckles like constellations, his delicate fingers lingering over Persephone’s tarot cards. He had become inhuman so quietly, another of Cabeswater’s belongings, and Ronan was not the least bit surprised. Adam had seemed different from the beginning. Ronan should know; he was different, too. He thought of Adam’s teeth dragging across his mouth, a nervous tic Ronan could never help but clock. Many people mistakenly thought Adam shy, when the truth was that he chose his words so carefully sometimes there weren’t any left when he was done; many people mistakenly thought Ronan too wrapped up in himself to notice anyone else, when the truth was that he never stopped noticing. It was part of being a Greywarren. You had to memorize the exact shape, the texture, the pulse hidden beneath the object, in order to dream it.

Ronan thought of Adam, and of dreams, and because he thought of both at once, he found himself within sight of a red Camaro, or perhaps the other way around. It was not the Camaro he had left Gansey in some time ago, but the Camaro of last summer. The difference was subtle, but he could feel it. Two boys in Aglionby sweaters sat in it, parked in front of a row of mailboxes, a hazy half-remembered trailer just visible down the road. The first boy chewed a mint leaf. The second boy looked at his shoes and tried to make himself hollow, far away, every light on and every room a vacancy.

This was Adam Parrish’s nightmare.

Ronan closed in on the car until he could hear what they were saying, if they were saying. As he went he tugged at already-frayed threads of magic, calling up the guise of lens blur, a shape your eye could not quite catch, just out of the frame. He didn’t know how to deal with this one yet. It was best to keep hidden.

“How did you know?” Adam asked, still looking at his shoes. There was a yellowing bruise on his cheek, a hint of accusation in his voice. “You never said anything. You never mentioned it to me.”

Dream Gansey chewed his mint leaf. “Anyone could see it,” he said, not unkindly, but firmly. Kingly. He rolled the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows and leaned against the wheel, regarding Adam through his long eyelashes. “Are you going to deny it again? Say you fell down? Fell down, no doubt, but only onto his fists.”

Adam flinched. Ronan was sure, if this was a memory, that Gansey had not been so cruel, but it was Adam’s head, and dreams twisted everything. “I can’t— I can’t do it like you want. You don’t understand.” Vehemence transformed _understand_ to _undastan’_ , native accent slipping in, softened and unwanted. “Don’t ask me to leave.”

“Who’s asking?” said dream Gansey, chewing his mint leaf with more vigor. His eyes had gone dark, his knuckles white. He was livid. He was fury. He was war. He looked like Ronan, thought Ronan, with deep satisfaction; he looked like Ronan the very moment before Ronan had struck Robert Parrish.

“I know that’s what you want,” Adam said.

“I want you to be safe,” Gansey said, seeming to draw himself impossibly taller, impossibly more elegant. His hair glowed like a crown. “I want you to be happy.”

“Okay,” Adam whispered, hand frozen on the passenger door latch. “Okay.”

“Are you happy?” Gansey asked, mint leaf going on and on forever, never dissolving. He reached out a hand to Adam, and though he kept stretching and stretching and stretching his fingers, they never touched Adam, with his hand on the passenger door latch and his heart in his lovely mouth, always leaving, always leaving, never pleased. “Are you happy here, Adam? Are you happy? Are you happy?”

Adam didn’t answer. Nightmare Gansey kept asking, over and over, an endless non-progression of three words that cut to the bone and kept cutting until there was nothing left but dust, and then he cut that too. _Are you happy? Are you happy?_ And then Gansey wasn’t in the Pig, he was in Cabeswater and he was bleeding out in dream Ronan’s arms, convulsing, and dream Ronan was screaming himself hoarse, screaming, _Are you happy now, Adam? Are you happy?_ and then they were all Blue, her mouth a snarl, saying, _What do you want, Adam? What do you want?_

Then, to Ronan’s horror, Blue was Robert Parrish, and everywhere he walked flowers shriveled away to nothing, death spreading through Cabeswater like a sickness, shoulders swinging like the blade of a guillotine. “You asked for this,” he said. “You wanted this.”

The air crackled and writhed, Adam’s hands raised palm-up to the sky, electricity sucking and spinning around him, a black hole protection, and Ronan began to move. He knew that look: Adam thought himself a god, and he was going to destroy his father, or destroy himself. There was to be no third option unless Ronan created one, so he punched Robert Parrish in the face. Again.

He swung and kept swinging until he could taste ash and copper in his mouth and his lungs ached and the dream shifted again, and he was throwing his weight at nothing and Adam was behind him. He put his hand on Ronan’s shoulder, and everything stopped.

“Ronan?” he said, and Ronan could breathe.

“Hey,” Ronan said, and Adam pressed himself up on the tips of his toes and kissed him. _Sorry, what?_ Ronan thought. _Is this my dream or yours?_

“I don’t know,” Adam whispered. “Maybe it’s both. I hope it’s both.”

“Okay,” Ronan said, very quietly. He took Adam’s face in his hands. “Just in case it is yours, you shouldn’t listen to them. You don’t have to be happy, you don’t have to know what you want, and you never deserved anything he did to you. And Gansey doesn’t see you as a charity case, you idiot. He’s goddamn awful at showing it but he wants to help you because he cares about you. He’s your friend. So am I, and so is Blue, and so is Noah.” For good measure, he added, “And you can do anything. You’re Cabeswater’s magician. You’re fucking unstoppable. Got it?”

“Yes,” said Adam obediently. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Seriously, don’t mention it. Internalize it and then forget it ever happened. And that was a really great kiss,” Ronan said, and Adam woke up.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> if this feels incomplete, unfinished, unsatisfying: good. that's human.


End file.
